Tag Archives: gluten-free

My dad hates getting up early in the morning. If left alone, he’d probably sleep until 11am every day. But he did it. He did it every damn morning of my childhood, weekends too. Rising to darkness, he’d shower, iron his shirt and slacks (my father can press clothes with a tailor’s precision) dress himself, eat, and get out the door to bake the bread that fed our family—all in a half hour.

I’d rise about an hour later, but I felt his presence every morning in the steamy bathroom that trapped the smell of the cologne he’s worn for 30 years, the light hum of the voices on the morning news he’d left on in the other room, and, without fail, from the sight of the crumb-filled, half-finished Tetley tea that sat on his side of the kitchen table.

It’s curious that my dad drank Tetley in the morning (and still does). Persian, he comes from a tea culture. Tea is the national drink for a reason: Iran’s coastal climate and topography are perfect for tea cultivation, and Iranians drink tea after every meal. The tea is often brewed in glass pots with a cylindrical infuser and poured into small, slender, filigreed glasses. An Iranian tea set is quite the vision, the ceremony of drinking from it an aesthetician’s wet dream. The glasses seem to deliver a cautionary message: The hot glass will scorch your fingertips if you drink the tea when it is too hot for its flavor to be appreciated. The aroma of Iranian black tea is nothing like stateside tea, and the ritual surrounding drinking it brings together families, friends, and strangers. When there is tea, there are no divides; Iranian Muslims and Jews sip together in the tea houses that are found on every corner (though any divides are sensationalized anyway). Place a lump of pure cane sugar on your tongue, sip, close your eyes, breathe, let the marijuana-like high roll over you, and repeat—this is how Persian tea should be enjoyed. Drink it in the summer, no matter the temperature; drink it in the winter to thaw chilled bones. Drink it with rock candy (the confection originated in Iran, not at seaside American candy shops); swirl your crystal-laden stick in the warm amber liquid and let it melt. Drink it with rose-scented pistachio nougat. Continue reading →

I have writer’s block. I have too much on my mind to be creative, so whatever I write here to take up space would be a bunch of feathery BS. No one likes feathery BS.

I don’t think writer’s block is all bad—it gives me the headspace to create other things—but I’m not going to go too far into it since I’m not really a Writer writer.

I do still want to share this recipe for Pistachio Baci di Dama, though, for three reasons: 1. I’m sick of waiting for the words to come back. 2. I saw a two-pack of them being sold at Hell on Earth (Trader Joe’s, for the uninitiated), so I feel a trend coming on and I want to beat it. 3. Baci di Dama means “lady’s kisses” in Italian, and posting the recipe any closer to Valentine’s Day would be way too cute. 729 Layers, Inc. doesn’t tolerate treacle.

My father uttered some unintelligible word to the waiter and in minutes the young man returned with a tall, skinny glass of white liquid flecked with green. The beverage was thick but not so much so that it held the straw in place. “Have a sip,” my dad encouraged, as he pushed the glass next to my Coke. “What is it?,” I asked. “Yogurt.”

Yogurt? I hesitated before pursing my lips around the straw to drink. Sour, herbaceous, intensely savory yet very lean-tasting. The excessive saltiness surprised me and I did what I could to keep from spitting out the bubbly brew. “ICK. How can you drink that?”

I couldn’t have been older than nine or ten that first time I tried doogh, the Persian yogurt-and–carbonated water drink. It was at Mirage, a restaurant in Framingham, MA that was owned by dad’s friend. Though not hurting for Lebanese or Greek, Worcester County, where I grew up, lacked Persian restaurants. So on weekend nights when my mom was working, the two of us would travel, mostly silent, to Framingham for big platters of steaming rice adorned with crunchy browned tahdig and sumac-dusted kebabs, accompanied by charred whole plum tomatoes. I avoided doogh for many years; it tasted like watery mast-o-khiar (a Persian cucumber dip similar to tzatziki but made from a much thicker kind of Iranian yogurt). Every time my father ordered it, I recalled the unpleasant way it coated my mouth.

My journals are all filled with intelligible-to-only-me scribbles; I need new ones. All I have left are a couple of pocket-size notebooks with kitschy donuts on the front because who doesn’t need pocket-size notebooks with kitschy donuts on the front? The headspace between lines is cramped. The notebooks are good depositories for tested then retested then axed then recovered recipes, but they lack the wide open spaces needed for my overworked mind and my overactive pen. I’ve delayed buying new ones. I haven’t written. I haven’t written when I might need to write most. It’s okay; I’m not a writer. I make a living bitching about other folks’ writing. Writing and editing use two different sides of the brain, I think. My craft won’t suffer. Why should I write when I have a to-do list that never ends? Why write when I can read and temporarily obscure my story by burrowing myself in the stories of others.

This morning—just like the last, and the one before that, and almost every morning for the past 5 weeks—I awoke to bright artificial light shining from behind swollen eyelids. The lids don’t lift; the heat of that light glues them shut and I have to make my brain move my forehead to force them open. My thick-framed glasses, folded fortunately, are wedged between the mattress and the small of my back. My comforter is on the ground, my bottle of prescription eye drops on my belly, held in place by a heavy, lifeless hand. In fact, neither of my hands, or arms or legs, can move for a good minute. My brain sends the signal; I concentrate hard, imagining the creaky bending of a robot’s joints. But the arms can’t keep up with these mental efforts. My cell phone is my sorry bedmate, sharing the pillow with me and threatening to die. “Low battery. 10% of battery remaining,” it passive-aggressively announces. The alarms on it are not set. I’m lucky I wake up without its buzzer.Continue reading →

When I was 16, I went to France for 10 days, living, speaking, and breathing the language and culture with a family of strangers in the Loire Valley for the first five days. I celebrated Easter with the family and enjoyed escargots. I ate aligot. My toes touched the sea at both Île de Rhé and La Baule. I bought a treasured tin of salted butter caramels in Brittany. I snuck into the discothèque without an ID (though I was old enough), stayed up until 5am and slept in until 1pm. I rode the bus and went to Nantes with my “sister” and her sophisticated, older Blonde, anorexic-skinny, multiple-pack-a-day-smoking, herb-taking, porcelain-skinned, ripped-jeaned cousin. I was now cultured. Right.

My love of all things French endured, and I studied the language and culture (and la gastronomie, bien sûr!) through college. Now, I’ll occasionally listen to French music. I’ll read Le Monde every once in a while. I’ll flip through a French cookbook a couple times a year. I can help with French culinary terms at work. But a francophile? Well, I’m posing. I am many years removed from my time in France, when I was confident about my language skills and up on current events. I am a phony. But I have my memories. And by recalling them, I might have the motivation to reconnect.

My memory had always been laser sharp—a gift I received not from my mother or father but perhaps from my grandmother. So it’s unfortunate that I can’t recall when I got my first cookbook that wasn’t a kid’s picture book. It must have been a Christmas gift—Christmas is the only time I receive cookbooks from family. I wish I remembered what title it was so I could know how all of this started.

This Christmas, I hope to see a couple cookbooks under the tree like this one and this one. Because lately I feel like I haven’t treated cookbooks as I used to. It’s been some time since I’ve flipped furiously. I don’t hold them as close; I don’t study them. I’ve been too wrapped up in my own cooking to take pause and keep up with newer works.

Normal people—those who do not fit squarely in either the “eat to live” or the “live to eat” categories but rather fall somewhere in between—enjoy going to restaurants. Savoring a meal that you didn’t have to make, perhaps in good company, is a universal pleasure. These normal people can appreciate a meal and think about it long after the waiter clears the dessert plates. Food musings are not reserved for the live to eaters.

Well, all of this is mere speculation because I am not normal. I am instead one of the group, an ever-growing population, of folks who can sit back and enjoy a nice meal out (again thankful that someone else labored over it for me) but who has the magnifying glass out. I don’t look for flaws; I’m not a critic or reviewer. I want to learn. I’ll pick apart a dish with imaginary tweezers to find within the creamy center: a flavor combination, a chef’s vision, a beating heart. I’d be a liar if I said that my own cooking doesn’t take inspiration from past restaurant meals; I think most would be if they affirmed the same.

I swear that the fall months were warmer when I was a kid. I remember wearing jean shorts and a light sweatshirt each year on my annual trip to the Brookfield Orchards with my mom. The orchard was a 45-minute drive from our house. We had orchards just a couple of towns over that we frequented, but driving a ways to get to one felt like an adventure. We’d navigate through orange, red, and yellow tree-lined back roads, our car engulfed by the fiery hue so that nothing green or grey was visible. We were probably singing in unison along to the Top 10, my soprano an octave above her alto.

Concord grapes are a New England treasure, as they were developed in—go figure—Concord, Massachusetts. Now they are most widely grown in other regions of the country, but it’s nice to know that little old Concord was the birthplace not only of freedom but also of the grapiest of grapes. Concord grapes are so grape-y that they may even seem artificial to first-time eaters. They’re very sweet, yet tart as well; they are the fresh fruit incarnate of grape jelly (and, less virtuously, of grape candies and grape soda).

Like other grapes, Concords are in season now, which is a hard concept to grasp, as many do not have access to locally grown grapes. Probably thought of as simply a California thing (have you seen the commercials?), folks buy overly elongated and mutantly large grapes in bags at the supermarket. They’re tasty enough. But local grapes, at least in these parts, are very different: rounder and often with thicker and more flavorful skins, they’re complex, musky even. The green are not sour; the red are not bland. And the Concord grape has the thickest skin of them all. Biting into one (be careful of seeds) is like experiencing grape times infinity: taut squeeze, rip, POP. They’re juicy and packed with flavor.

I crave an icy-cold, milky-white sphere, melting atop a rocky sea of blue. Snowy arteries, weave through the murkiness below, branching into artistic trails that spread fragrant cream through berries and juice.

I have a food love that I could discuss endlessly, despite it being wildly unspecific. It’s for warm blueberries and vanilla ice cream. The combination grabs me in any form: ice cream bathing in blueberry compote; blueberry pie à la mode; biscuit-covered, ice cream–topped cobbler; crispy waffles + blueberry syrup + heaps of ice cream (which I’d probably never order or make because I’m a civilized breakfast eater, but in my current sleepless state, I can dig it).

My mother and I first made this discovery at The Goldenrod (est. 1896), an old-fashioned candy store/ice cream parlor/soda fountain/restaurant, which is located at York Beach, ME. Just an hour and a half from our Central Mass home, my mom would take me there when I was little and on school vacation. There is always a group of people standing up to the window at the Goldenrod and watching the saltwater taffy being made. Slap, pull, stretch; slap, pull stretch—it’s happy monotony. It was at the Goldenrod that I had my first tuna melt. It was at the Goldenrod that I had my first (and last) cream soda. And it was at the Goldenrod that I first realized that blueberry pie should always be warm and that vanilla ice cream should always come with. Thus, it was at the Goldenrod that I discovered happiness.